The scope of Luke's gospel: the mediator, the Son of man revealing God in delivering grace

The Gospel of Luke sets the Lord before us in the character of
Son of man, revealing God in delivering grace among men. Hence the
present operation of grace and its effect are more referred to, and
even the present time prophetically, not the substitution of other
dispensations as in Matthew, but of saving heavenly grace. At
first, no doubt (and just because He is to be revealed as man, and
in grace to men), we find Him, in a prefatory part in which we have
the most exquisite picture of the godly remnant, presented to
Israel, to whom He had been promised, and in relationship with whom
He came into this world; but afterwards this Gospel presents moral
principles which apply to man, whosoever he may be, whilst yet
manifesting Christ for the moment in the midst of that people. This
power of God in grace is displayed in various ways in its
application to the wants of men. After the transfiguration, which
is recounted earlier in the narration by Luke* than in the other
Gospels, we find the judgment of those who rejected the Lord, and
the heavenly character of the grace which, because it is grace,
addresses itself to the nations, to sinners, without any particular
reference to the Jews, overturning the legal principles according
to which the latter pretended to be, and as to their external
standing were originally called at Sinai to be, in connection with
God. Unconditional promises to Abraham, etc., and prophetic
confirmation of them, are another thing. They will be accomplished
in grace, and were to be laid hold of by faith. After this, we find
that which should happen to the Jews according to the righteous
government of God; and, at the end, the account of the death and
resurrection of the Lord, accomplishing the work of redemption. We
must observe that Luke (who morally sets aside the Jewish system,
and who introduces the Son of man as the man before God, presenting
Him as the One who is filled with all the fulness of God dwelling
in Him bodily, as the man before God, according to His own heart,
and thus as Mediator between God and man, and centre of a moral
system much more vast than that of Messiah among the Jews) -- we
must observe, I repeat, that Luke, who is occupied with these new
relations (ancient, in fact, as to the counsels of God), gives us
the facts belonging to the Lord's connection with the Jews, owned
in the pious remnant of that people, with much more development
than the other evangelists, as well as the proofs of His mission to
that people, in coming into the world -- proofs which ought to have
gained their attention, and fixed it upon the child who was born to
them.

{*That is, as to the contents of the Gospel. In the Luke 9 His
last journey up to Jerusalem begins; and thence on to the latter
part of the eighteenth, where (v. 31) His going up to that city is
noticed, the evangelist gives mainly a series of moral
instructions, and the ways of God in grace now coming in. In Luke
18: 35 we have the blind man of Jericho already noticed as the
commencement of His last visit to Jerusalem.}

Christ set forth as a man on earth

In Luke, I add, that which especially characterises the
narrative and gives its peculiar interest to this Gospel is, that
it sets before us that which Christ is Himself. It is not His
official glory, a relative position that He assumed; neither is it
the revelation of His divine nature, in itself; nor His mission as
the great Prophet. It is Himself, as He was, a man on the earth --
the Person whom I should have met every day had I lived at that
time in Judea, or in Galilee.